[GW] Things You Get Used To

You can call the skills whatever you want. The effect is what matters. So why force players to re-learn the same skills by calling it “beast strike” or some such when you can just re-use the normal class skill?

12 thoughts on “[GW] Things You Get Used To”

I was fortunate really, in that GW1 was my first MMO, so everything they presented me with I just accepted without question. It also kinda made sense that if there is magic, not just humans would use it, so you would find monsters flinging the same skills at you as you might at them.

I can see how it looks a bit bizarre if you aren’t used to that though. And I do kinda like how GW2 is doing it a bit differently, because sometimes the class distinctions of enemy mobs did seem a little arbitrary.

Its the same for every skill in mmos, they are just a set number of mechanics arranged in different combinations and with different strengths. Understanding that is the first step towards being able to construct effective builds.
The nice thing about guild wars is that the enemies rarely have access to mechanics which you don’t, so you can transfer a lot if the skills you learn fighting then into the PvP arena.

Guild Wars seems to be almost unique among mmos in using exactly the same mechanics for npcs as for player characters. Arena may have taken this approach so they could reuse code but it allows for some interesting emergent gameplay including the famous death leveling approach used in getting the “Legendary Defender of Ascalon” title.

Normally you cannot get to level 20 in the beginner zone of pre-searing Ascalon because the mobs are too low level to give you XP. If you allow the mobs to kill you enough times though they will level up and then you can resurrect and kill them for XP.

Hmm, interesting. You started posting all sorts of GW stuff right around when I dug up my old disks to revisit the game. Thanks for posting. They’re keeping my attention to the game. I mainly play Lineage 2 now and… well, that game will suck you in and the highly competitive nature of the game keeps you in.

You can actually temporarily copy skills from the skillbar of the monsters to your own skill bar with skills like Arcane Thievery.

The second reason ist that you can capture all the skills from dead bosses. This would not work if the monsters use other skills. It is possible to capture quite a few non elite skills way before you reach a skill trainer for the skill in question.

There are quite a few skills that only monsters can use. These skills cannot be captured and are mostly very powerful. Look under monster skills in the unoffical wiki for a list.

As a side effect of the nature of monster skills Inspired/Revealed Enchantment/Hex cannot capture these skills and recharge instantly. This is useful in quite a few boss battles where you have to deal with monster skill induced hexes.

This is very helpfull in the battle with Glint who spams some very nasty monster hexes.

My first reaction? “Wait, why is my party dead? We just started fighting those things like 5 seconds ago!” (and my first reaction on fighting the Ceratadons on the way to the Bloodstone mission was “Wait, why is my party dead? We just started fighting those things like 2 seconds ago!”)

As I understand it (I might be wrong), the original GW PvE game was conceived partly as an introduction to the PvP game. Given this, it makes sense for the bad guys to be mostly using the same skills and mechanics as the PCs.